I tweeted a few days ago on the first of the New Year that I am refusing to call my intended accomplishments for 2009 “resolutions”. The term resolution is very open ended, rather vague and relatively unmeasurable. For instance, let’s take the typical “eat less, exercise more” resolution. How do you know when this has been accomplished? You don’t. Because of situations like this, I decided to switch to calling them New Year’s goals.

With me, ideas always come at the most inconvenient of times. I’m sitting in the shower, or eating something, or walking to work- anywhere but next to a computer or a pen and paper. But I’ve realized that this is because it’s the only time that my brain has to think freely and naturally, wondering from thought to thought remembering all of those things that I forgot to do last week, or coming up with a wonderful new idea.

To accommodate the way my brain thinks, I started keeping dry erase markers everywhere in my apartment, starting with the shower. I think of something, I jot it down on the wall next to me. Running with the idea, and playing off how much I enjoy working with whiteboard in the office to illustrate complex ideas and relationships, I covered the entire back of the main entrance to my apartment with a month-to-month agenda with key dates, next to my daily, weekly and monthly tasks that correlate to the goals that I’ve set for myself tonight. Image here.

On a previous blog of mine, Appify, I reviewed an application called Lifetick. Think of it like project management for your life. It organizes all of your goals and via the S.M.A.R.T. framework it forces one to set goals efficiently so that they can be accomplished on time. Lifetick is a great starting point for people who have lots of goals, but might be a little overwhelmed if they have lots of goals they want to accomplish in a short period of time.

I’ve kept up with several productivity blogs over the last year or two (I suggest reading a few), all of which offer seemingly endless ways to try and to get more out of your day. However, you might have to try lots of tactics and get creative in order to invent some of your own methods in order to truly find a way of working that suits the way your brain functions.

I have yet to officially fall into the perfect way of working and getting things done, but with some experimentation and lots of tweaking, I’m gradually inching closer state of mind and productivity that I find optimal.